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Do this. Stop doing that. If you're amenable to this kind of direction, you might like the Chaikin Portfolio Health Check that's rolling out this week.

"Find the winners. Drop the losers," is its mantra; and it goes so far as to suggest specific alternatives to what it judges to be your not-so-great stock ideas. Really? According to whom? According to Chaikin Stock Research CEO and founder Marc Chaikin. Health Check (chaikinpowertools.com/portfolio-health-check.shtml) is the latest spin on his analytical services that strive for institutional quality.

A trader, broker, and fundamental and quantitative analyst during a 40-year Wall Street career, Chaikin also invented two technical trading signals—the Chaikin Money Flow Indicator and the Chaikin Oscillator. In 1989, his diverse knowledge base was distilled into a real-time analytics workstation for stock traders and portfolio managers that's now sold to institutional investors by Thomson Reuters.

Part fundamental, part technical, but mostly quantitative, Chaikin calls his inter-disciplinary analysis "quantamental." It's all boiled down to a 20-factor model used to assess any tickers a subscriber types into the Chaikin Power Tools Android and iPhone apps or desktop PC widget. For $95 a year, subscribers receive weekly forecasts of where each stock is headed over the next three to six months.

Note the future tense and the investing horizon. This isn't a service like SigFig (sigfig.com) that tries to improve the long-term return of your portfolio through better asset allocation and cost management. Rather, of the hundreds of metrics employed in valuation and technical analysis, Chaikin claims that through back-testing he's identified 20 that are predictive of future price action. They're combined in different proportions to produce a Chaikin Power Rating—the kind of quant-oriented approach popular among institutions.

This model also is the basis for Chaikin's more exhaustive Chaikin Reports service (chaikinpowertools.com/reports) launched 18 months ago. It requires a separate $95 annual subscription; but, instead of once-a-week portfolio check-ups, the subscriber can order an unlimited number of four-page evaluations of the 5,000 individual securities Chaikin covers.

Although each analysis is complex, recommendations are easy to interpret since they're posted in colorful graphics. The key measure is the Chaikin Power Gauge. It summarizes a ticker's prospects in a single speedometer-like indicator whose green, red, or yellow indication signifies bullishness, bearishness, or caution, respectively. Despite the near-term horizon, Health Check is oriented toward investors, not traders, insists Chaikin.

"My years on Wall Street taught me that no one can predict what will happen a year out," he says. "But we recommend holding on to a stock as long as it has a bullish rating."

Change being the only market constant, Health Check alerts you to tickers which have had earnings revisions or surprises during the week and those whose earnings are due in the week ahead.

Like Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com), from which he gets much of his data, Chaikin believes that earnings events move share prices over the short term as much as any other factor.

Another tenet: a ticker's industry ranking and that industry's relative strength. Rather than using top-down indicators like relative strength or sector rotation, as other services do, he ranks industries from the bottom up, using the collective prospects of their constituent stocks.

A portfolio's holdings are then arrayed in the four quadrants of the Chaikin Power Grid that range from strong stocks in strong industries to weak stocks in weak groups. Again, green, red and yellow cues make these rankings immediately obvious. But, if there is any doubt, Health Check strongly recommends swapping any weak tickers or weak industries you may have chosen for alternatives it suggests.

Finally, Health Check conveys whether market sentiment is running for or against individual stocks over the past week among experts.

"Instead of buy-and-hold, we believe in buy and prune," says Chaikin. "Buy good stocks, but also get the weeds out of your garden before they take over."